Larry Catá Backer's comments on current issues in transnational law and policy. These essays focus on the constitution of regulatory communities (political, economic, and religious) as they manage their constituencies and the conflicts between them. The context is globalization. This is an academic field-free zone: expect to travel "without documents" through the sometimes strongly guarded boundaries of international relations, constitutional, international, comparative, and corporate law.

Globalization continues to transform the state, law, economics and culture. What had started as an efficient means of ordering global production, with a side benefit of economic integration potentially reducing conflict to advance national interests (only recently viewed as antique, tribal and unnecessary) has now morphed to create profound global orderings of economic, social, cultural, civil and political norms. "Indeed, one can understand the move toward control of civil society as
an expression--a rear guard action--that recognizes that, like economic
activity in the decades immediately proceeding this one, political
activity is no longer a matter for a polity encased within a territorial
state. Rather, internationalization of politics is an organic process
inherent in the processes of globalization itself."(Here).

This post considers the way that discomfort about the emergence of globalization as a economic, social, cultural, political and civil phenomenon has begun to produce resistance among elites--and the cultivation of a renewed nationalism that mimics, perhaps in its most unfortunate forms, the nationalism that became the illness of the inter-war period of the last century. That nationalism, stoked by national elites unable to effectively embrace their own national ideologies and to protect them unaided by assertions of power and control, may well threaten to divert globalization from its present course. And worse--globalization appears to have been weaponized in some of its forms (e.g., here). But to what ends?

Friday, August 26, 2016

I have been writing about the United Nations Forum on Business and Human Rights. (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here).
The Forum has been an important site for the meeting of key
international stakeholders who tend to control the discussion about
business and human rights in the international sphere. If for no other
reason, that is reason enough for sustained attention to its
proceedings (see, e.g., here).

The Secretariat of the Forum on Business and Human Rights has recently announced the opening of registration for the 2016 United Nations Forum on Business and Human Rights.

As per Human Rights Council resolution 17/4, the Forum is open to all relevant stakeholder groups, including States, the wider United Nations system, intergovernmental and regional organisations, businesses, labour unions, national human rights institutions, non-governmental organizations, and affected stakeholders, among others.

Tuesday, August 23, 2016

Philip G. Alston, the John Norton Pomeroy Professor of Law at New York University is by any measure one of the most acclaimed and influential individuals of his generation- This is especially so in matters touching on international law. His own biography suggests the breadth of his expertise and influence. In 2014, he was appointed by the UN Human Rights Council as its Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights. "The expert is required by the Human Rights Council to examine and report back to member States on initiatives taken to promote and protect the rights of those living in extreme poverty, with a view to advancing the eradication of such poverty." (Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights).

The mandate includes country visits. Recently the country visit to China was concluded. It was therefore with a great deal of anticipation that I read through his just distributed End-of-mission statement on China, which he prepared in his capacity as Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights.

This report is an important statement and should be carefully read--not so much for what it has to say about China, but for its value as evidence of the still altogether large chasm that separates Western internationalists and the world view encapsulated in the international sphere with its great project of coordinated multi-level legalization grounded in Western constitutionalism, from the world view of an advanced Marxist Leninist governmental apparatus singularly bent on the construction of Socialist democracy. This last point, of course, will be dismissed--and no doubt mocked--in the West. And rightly so from their perspective, which is necessarily grounded in the premise that Marxist Leninist state organization is ultimately inconsistent with the construction of an international legal and normative architecture. It is that unstated premise that haunts the report, and from the internationalist and Western perspective, enhances its power. But that enhancement will likely come at a price--if its intended audience are other than the global intelligentsia now so deeply committed to a very specific project of global norm institutionalization.

Monday, August 22, 2016

The European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI) is an international scientific non-profit association providing .a forum for debate and dialogue between academics, legislators and practitioners, focusing on major corporate governance issues and thereby promoting best practice. ECGI recently concluded its conference in Asia, co-organized by the University of Tokyo and co-hosted by the EU Delegation to Japan. Links to videos of some of the presentations follow.

Sunday, August 21, 2016

On 14 July 2016, the Ministry of Civil Affairs of the People's Republic
of China issued the Measures for the Designation of Charitable
Organizations (Opinion Soliciting Draft) for public comment (English version). The issue of the designation of status is critical for civil society organizations. The extent of the constraints on the discretionary authority of decision making administrators becomes the linchpin of the statutory scheme.

My colleague, Flora Sapio, provided some quite valuable comments to the Ministry. She has given me permission to share these on this site. Her Comment on the Measures for the Designation of Charitable Organizations appears below.

Thursday, August 18, 2016

Norway's sovereign wealth fund, the Government Pension Fund Global, has been a leader in forging a new approach to the outward projection of state authority through global private activities. Norway has provided an architecture of governance that sits astride the borders of market and state, of public and private and of national and international. Undertaken through its sovereign wealth fund, Norway is seeking not merely to project public wealth into private global markets, but also to construct a complex rule-of-law centered framework that blends the imperatives of a state based public policy with a rules based governance system that incorporates domestic and international norms. To this Norway adds a policy-oriented use of traditional shareholder power to affect the behavior and governance of companies in which the Fund has invested. (Explored HERE).

Critical to the success of the the project of public regulatory governance through state activities as a private actor, has been the institutionalization of rules for active shareholding where the state, through its SWF, owns an equity stake in a private enterprise. Norway had been quite transparent in this effort. In 2016 the Pension Fund Global Investments manager, Norges Bank, distributed its Global Voting Guidelines.

This post describes and considers the Global Voting Guidelines and their effect on the internationalization of corporate governance through the private economic activities of states. It is an excellent example of the application of regulatory governance at the implementation stage--where the state serves as the aggregator of internationalized standards, which it constructs to suit its own tastes, and thus constructed uses its investment ministries not merely as oversight agents but as active agents, exercising discretion in the form of shareholder rights to participate and exit.

Wednesday, August 17, 2016

This Post includes Larry Catá Backer's reflections on Zhou Ruijin,
"Reflections on the Cultural Revolution: A Ten Thousand Character
Petition." It is part of a group of reflections on that essay. The
Introduction to this series noted:

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Great Proletarian Cultural
Revolution in China. That episode remains sensitive in China, and like
other great transformative events in human history, continues to
reverberate in countless ways. It's cultural artifacts have acquired a
global dimension--from Mao Zedong's Little Red Book (毛主席语录), to the mythologies of the Red Guards as an archetypal force that saw its pattern repeated across the globe (e.g. here, here, here).

Recently Gao Dawei on his blog 高大伟 在美国华盛顿人的博客 published a remarkable essay on the Cultural Revolution first anonymously and then under the author's name, Zhou Ruijin (English) (中国语文) (Text of the article copied from the China Elections and Governance website ). That essay, Reflections on the Cultural Revolution: A Ten Thousand Character Petition (皇甫欣平：文革反思万言书)
By Huangfuxinping [Zhou Ruijin 周瑞金 ], harks back to an ancient Chinese
practice of presenting such 10,000 character petitions "sometimes at
great personal risk, to criticize current policies and suggest a change
in thinking." . at . According
to that website, the article was published under the pseudonym in China
but was removed from many sites shortly after appearing.

The essay includes much to think about, not just in the Chinese context,
but in any context in which one party, or elite group, has developed a
structural basis for its leadership of the state and its governmental
apparatus. That applies as much in Marxist Leninist states (to which
the essay is directed) as it does in theocratic states (the clerical
elite) and Western states (the socio-economic-political elites). To
that end, Flora Sapio, Jean Mittelstaedt and I thought it might be
worthwhile to add very brief reflections on this essay.

This Post includes Jean Mittelstadt's reflections on Zhou Ruijin,
"Reflections on the Cultural Revolution: A Ten Thousand Character
Petition." It is part of a group of reflections on that essay. The
Introduction to this series noted:

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Great Proletarian Cultural
Revolution in China. That episode remains sensitive in China, and like
other great transformative events in human history, continues to
reverberate in countless ways. It's cultural artifacts have acquired a
global dimension--from Mao Zedong's Little Red Book (毛主席语录), to the mythologies of the Red Guards as an archetypal force that saw its pattern repeated across the globe (e.g. here, here, here).

Recently Gao Dawei on his blog 高大伟 在美国华盛顿人的博客 published a remarkable essay on the Cultural Revolution first anonymously and then under the author's name, Zhou Ruijin (English) (中国语文) (Text of the article copied from the China Elections and Governance website ). That essay, Reflections on the Cultural Revolution: A Ten Thousand Character Petition (皇甫欣平：文革反思万言书)
By Huangfuxinping [Zhou Ruijin 周瑞金 ], harks back to an ancient Chinese
practice of presenting such 10,000 character petitions "sometimes at
great personal risk, to criticize current policies and suggest a change
in thinking." . at . According
to that website, the article was published under the pseudonym in China
but was removed from many sites shortly after appearing.

The essay includes much to think about, not just in the Chinese context,
but in any context in which one party, or elite group, has developed a
structural basis for its leadership of the state and its governmental
apparatus. That applies as much in Marxist Leninist states (to which
the essay is directed) as it does in theocratic states (the clerical
elite) and Western states (the socio-economic-political elites). To
that end, Flora Sapio, Jean Mittelstadt and I thought it might be
worthwhile to add very brief reflections on this essay.

Tuesday, August 16, 2016

This Post includes Flora Sapio's reflections on Zhou Ruijin, "Reflections on the Cultural Revolution: A Ten Thousand Character Petition." It is part of a group of reflections on that essay. The Introduction to this series noted:

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Great Proletarian Cultural
Revolution in China. That episode remains sensitive in China, and like
other great transformative events in human history, continues to
reverberate in countless ways. It's cultural artifacts have acquired a
global dimension--from Mao Zedong's Little Red Book (毛主席语录), to the mythologies of the Red Guards as an archetypal force that saw its pattern repeated across the globe (e.g. here, here, here).

Recently Gao Dawei on his blog 高大伟 在美国华盛顿人的博客 published a remarkable essay on the Cultural Revolution first anonymously and then under the author's name, Zhou Ruijin (English) (中国语文) (Text of the article copied from the China Elections and Governance website ). That essay, Reflections on the Cultural Revolution: A Ten Thousand Character Petition (皇甫欣平：文革反思万言书)
By Huangfuxinping [Zhou Ruijin 周瑞金 ], harks back to an ancient Chinese
practice of presenting such 10,000 character petitions "sometimes at
great personal risk, to criticize current policies and suggest a change
in thinking." . at . According
to that website, the article was published under the pseudonym in China
but was removed from many sites shortly after appearing.

The essay includes much to think about, not just in the Chinese context,
but in any context in which one party, or elite group, has developed a
structural basis for its leadership of the state and its governmental
apparatus. That applies as much in Marxist Leninist states (to which
the essay is directed) as it does in theocratic states (the clerical
elite) and Western states (the socio-economic-political elites). To
that end, Flora Sapio, Jean Mittelstaedt and I thought it might be
worthwhile to add very brief reflections on this essay.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China. That episode remains sensitive in China, and like other great transformative events in human history, continues to reverberate in countless ways. It's cultural artifacts have acquired a global dimension--from Mao Zedong's Little Red Book (毛主席语录), to the mythologies of the Red Guards as an archetypal force that saw its pattern repeated across the globe (e.g. here, here, here).

Recently Gao Dawei on his blog 高大伟 在美国华盛顿人的博客 published a remarkable essay on the Cultural Revolution first anonymously and then under the author's name, Zhou Ruijin (English) (中国语文) (Text of the article copied from the China Elections and Governance website ). That essay, Reflections on the Cultural Revolution: A Ten Thousand Character Petition (皇甫欣平：文革反思万言书) By Huangfuxinping [Zhou Ruijin 周瑞金 ], harks back to an ancient Chinese practice of presenting such 10,000 character petitions "sometimes at great personal risk, to criticize current policies and suggest a change in thinking." . at . According to that website, the article was published under the pseudonym in China but was removed from many sites shortly after appearing.

The essay includes much to think about, not just in the Chinese context, but in any context in which one party, or elite group, has developed a structural basis for its leadership of the state and its governmental apparatus. That applies as much in Marxist Leninist states (to which the essay is directed) as it does in theocratic states (the clerical elite) and Western states (the socio-economic-political elites). To that end, Flora Sapio, Jean Mittelstaedt and I thought it might be worthwhile to add very brief reflections on this essay.

The essay follows (English) (中国语文). Later posts include the equally brief reflections of the three of us:

The Conference theme is Disruption, Temporality, Law: The Future of Law and Society Scholarship. It offers a marvelous opportunity both to take stack and to advance the discipline. The Call for paper and Conference description follows. It may also be accessed HERE.

Professor Knox is currently preparing his thematic report on biodiversity and human rights, to be presented at the 34th session of the Human Rights Council.

He has circulated a call for inputs which follows. For those interested in this important work this is an opportunity to engage in an effective way. I would be especially interested in the intersection of the United Nations Guiding Principles for Business and Human Rights, the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises and the work of Professor Knox. For those committed to a Comprehensive Treaty for Business and Human Rights, this also provides an opportunity to suggest the connections between Professor Knox's work and the substance or principles underlying the treaty effort.

Thursday, August 11, 2016

Tsinghua University Law School, its Research Center for Philosophy of Law and Politics, the Taing hua Modern Law Research Center, and the China Law Review jointly sponsored a Conference, "Foreigners and Modern Chinese Law." The conference was organized by Professor Xu Zhangrun and Professor Chen Xinyu, Tsinghua University School of Law. Conference Program HERE.

I delivered remarks--"China, Law, and the Foreigner: Mutual Engagements on a Global Stage." The presentation focused on the development of template for interactions between foreigners and Chinese with respect to "modernization" by the end of the Qing. Those patterns can be understood as clustered around a series of archetypes of foreign engagement and a small set of Chinese responses oscillating between opening up and shutting off. These archetypes and responses reflected the varying states of asymmetries of knowledge disparities and perceptions of need. The presentation ended with lessons to be drawn from this pattern of engagement as China assumes the role of "foreigner" within many states.

The paper will be available in a future post.

English language PowerPoints of the presentation may be accessed HERE.

Tsinghua University Law School, its Research Center for Philosophy of Law and Politics, the Taing hua Modern
Law Research Center, and the China Law Review jointly sponsored a Conference, "Foreigners and Modern Chinese Law." The conference was organized by Professor Xu Zhangrun and Professor Chen Xinyu, Tsinghua University School
of Law.

The Conference theme focused on the contribution to the Chinese legal system and legal education of foreigners who came to China from the time of the modern era since the Qing dynasty. The discussion was structured around a set of specific questions of foreigners and modern Chinese law:

--Their contribution and morality about law and jurisprudence in China;

In August, Tsinghua University University Law School's Research Center for Philosophy of Law and Politics, the Taing hua Modern Law Research Center, and the China Law Review jointly sponsored a conference entitled, "Foreigners and Modern Chinese Law" (for information see HERE).

I delivered remarks--"China, Law, and the Foreigner: Mutual Engagements on a Global Stage." Those remarks have been transcribed in English and Chinese and posted to the Weibo microblog site of Tsinhua's San Hui Fang Society as Post 161-1 and No. 161-2. I will make the transcript available in a future post.

For this post, and to my non Chinese readers, I wanted to take this opportunity to introduce 叁會學坊, the San Hui Fang Workshops, of Tsinghua University Research Center for Philosophy of Law and Politics and sponsored by the Huayu Hanyu Law Research Foundation. It's statement is provided in in English and 中国语文.

Tuesday, August 09, 2016

The Open-ended Intergovernmental Working Group on Transnational Corporations and other business enterprises was established in the wake of a successful effort by a group of states to seek a treaty based approach to the regulation of the conduct of so-called transnational enterprises under international law. This movement toward a comprehensive treaty has been supported by a substantial number of civil society organizations and developing states, but opposed by business and developed states which have sought to further develop the Guiding Principles for Business and Human Rights (see, e.g., here). I have written about this project from the perspective of a supportive skeptic (see, here, here, here, and here).

As part of its Mandate, the first two sessions of the open-ended intergovernmental working group “shall be dedicated to conducting constructive deliberations on the content, scope, nature and form of the future international instrument.” To that end, it has issued a call for written contributions relevant ot the work of the OEIGWG on possible principles, scope and elements of an international legally binding instrument.

Monday, August 08, 2016

The United Nations recently released a very useful chart of the institutional organization of the U.N. institutions whose work touches on or focuses on the human rights missions of this international organization and its coordinate parts.

That chart is worth considering for what it tells us of the institutionalization of human rights within international public organizations that touch on complexity, fracture, fluidity, permeability, and polycentricity.

CECC tends to serve as an excellent barometer of the thinking of
political and academic elites in the United States about issues touching
on China and the official American line developed in connection with
those issues. As such it is an important source of information about the
way official and academic sectors think about China.

In September 2015 during the run up to the the state visit of Xi Jinping to the United States,
the CECC announced activities that focused on its current critical
line toward Chinese policies. announcing hearings on the recent detention of
Chinese lawyers (see, e.g., HERE). That focus has been renewed ahead of the G-20 Summit. Representative Christopher H. Smith, chair, and Senator Marco Rubio,
cochair, issued the following statements in response to the public
confessions and trials involving human rights lawyers and religious
leader Hu Shigen. The issue is quite sensitive in China ("China has rebuked the US for criticising its convictions of human rights activists, a court this week having sentenced three rights advocates and a lawyer to up to seven and half years in jail for subversion." here).

The issues have ramifications far beyond the trials themselves. It combines issues of internal application of its own normative framework, nationalism and fears of external subversion, while responding to substantial pressure form abroad. The nationalism and fear of subversion is particularly strong at the moment, it appears. "China
kicked off trials for a group of lawyers and human rights activists
Tuesday, accusing them of being part of a broad Western campaign to
overthrow the one-party state by fomenting a “color revolution.”" (see, here). But it is also quite sensitive in the United States where the Chinese situation might prove useful in helping this nation understand itself better in the reflection of others.

Friday, August 05, 2016

In the 21st Century, the ideology of globalization, in its domestic and international components have served to frame the conceptual universe within which law, politics, economics and society are understood. But that ideology also masks some sometimes substantial differences in the ways in which states approach these issues from their own ideological home bases. And indeed, may ignore the way that these ideological sub structures may produce meaning substantially at variance with "common understanding" elsewhere. This is most sharply presented when considering the integration of Marxist Leninist systems within the global order. Even when Westerners are moved to consider the ideological lens through which such participation is made by Asian Marxist Leninist states, it is not taken seriously, as the lenses of pragmatism and "rational acting" along classical liberal lines displaces such analysis. That is a mistake--one which is emphasized every time Westerners misread those actors. Since the normalization of relations between the United States and Cuba, an additional variation of Marxist Leninist ideology--one that owes its sources to European Marxism, has again emerged, and may be influential within some quarters in Latin America and other developing states.

Wednesday, August 03, 2016

Corporate sustainability has become quite fashionable of late. It has the great benefit of fusing together issues of long term profitability, targeted projection into sectors of consumer markets (especially for higher end products), risk management and mitigation, and corporate social responsibility in a way that makes a "business" case for reducing the traditional business subsidy from free riding the "commons." It focuses on long term consumer value, and incorporates the terminologies and viewpoints of corporate social responsibility and risk management (the later in the sense of mitigating risk--legal, social and reputational) within a business climate that increasingly tends to seek "rents" for use of "public" spaces and resources once treated as "free." The later, in the context of the business and human rights sector, also includes issues touching on constraining employer freedoms to exploit labor as a commodity consumed in the production process.

But like other initiatives undertaken by large institutional actors with complex bureaucracies (for example, the state) and dynamic stakeholder communities (for enterprises--investors, consumers, the state, competitors, creditors and labor), enterprises have scrambled to define and develop consensus about the appropriate architecture for the exercise fo sustainability and the initiatives assigned to that category of enterprise activity.

To that end our friends at the Conference Board have just completed and published quite interesting data on the ways in which sustainability is being institutionalized within global business enterprises.

A survey by The Conference Board shows executives point to board engagement on sustainability issues as a strong indicator of leadership in corporate sustainability. Yet a separate survey of 307 SEC-registered businesses shows only 36% of businesses assign responsibility for sustainability oversight to the board. However, there are significant variations by company size, as almost 68% of companies with revenues of more than $20 billion assign this responsibility to the board. Among these larger companies, sustainability oversight is most often assigned to a dedicated standing committee of the board or to an existing nominating/governance committee. Among smaller companies – those with revenues below $1 billion – sustainability oversight typically falls to the CEO or to a senior executive reporting directly to the CEO.

States in both Marxist and free market economies have distinct views about markets. At their extremes, the former is suspicious and would substitute the state apparatus for virtually all market functions; the latter is suspicious of any control and would substitute markets for virtually all public and private activity. Most states fall somewhere in the broad middle--intervening in markets through regulatory governance mechanisms in "free market" stares and substituting state direction or direct control ion "socialist" states.

The drive to control or manage markets applies not just to markets for capital and goods--it applies in equal measure to markets for labor. All states regulate their labor markets to a greater or lesser degree. All are suspicious and regulate the forms of mass movements by labor and their interventions in economic and political life. But where the state manages labor, like other commodities that are production inputs (like capital), or as one of the means of production whose regulation are essential to ensuring the general welfare of society, it produces something of a contradiction. That contradiction is inherent in the dual nature of labor--at once both a "thing" (and essential to economic activity) and a "person" for whose general welfare, as part of the sovereign masses for whose welfare all of this control is deployed in the first place.

But what happens when the state is the labor market? And the State may retain the profits from labor and distribute it in accordance with its policy? Centrally planned Marxist economies--like that in Cuba (but unlike China)--evidence a particularly hard version of this contradiction. It was most recently evidenced in the efforts by the Cuban Communist Party to develop a new Model theory for their political economy--the 'Conceptualisation of the Cuban socio-economic socialist development
model' ("Conceptualización del modelo económico y social Cubano de desarrollo socialista") (discussed HERE), That model speak to the recognition of the motivation of the working class to work and to be efficient, as well as the erosion of socialist values (Ibid., ¶ 30 ("ha afectado la motivación para trabajar y ser eficientes, a la vez que se bserva cierta erosión de valores inherentes a nuestra sociedad")), a revolutionary consciousness (Iboid. ¶ 52) that would help establish a "revolutionary worker" willing and eager to contribute productively and efficiently as directed by central planning needs and recognizing her role as a contributor to the functioning of a revolutionary society as an owner of the means of produciton (Ibid., ¶ 80 "de una clase obrera revolucionaria, capaz de trabajar con eficiencia y productividad en función del cumplimiento de los planes, reconociendo su papel de dueño —como parte de todo el pueblo—, de los medios fundamentales de producción"). The product would be the existence of a system of perfected planning from the top that is rational, agile, that is powered by by motivated workers adequately paid producing wealth for the common good (Ibid., ¶ 139). And for people in Cuba, that suggests the contradiction between motivated workers and a paymaster state which also directs all of the means of production to its own ends.

René Gómez Manzano
is an independent journalist and critical outsider in Cuba. He has for
many years reported on changed within the Cuban state and its ruling
Communist Party. Educated in Havana and Moscow he began defending
dissidents in 1990 and has served time in prison for his actions. He
remains active in Cuba and tolerated by the state ad PPC. Amnesty
International named him a prisoner of conscience in 1998 after his
arrest and imprisonment in the late 1990s. He provides a view of the issue of labor and labor discipline within a centrally planned model of Marxist political economy where the state substitutes itself for markets. His essay, in Spanish, "El obrero cubano, un nuevo “subproducto”, originally published in Cubanet, follows.

Starting almost 20 years ago, as I was looking at the construction of the present institutional framework for the provision of poor relief in the United States, I noted its utility for virtually all of the virtues of an industrial society, other than the alleviation of poverty (e.g., here). True to its ancient roots in the transformation of early modern Europe (e.g., here) it was, and remains, an instrument through which social, legal, and economic forces are brought to bear to socialize the poor and to assuage the rest (e.g., here). Over the last quarter century much has changed, yet the overall dynamic has not, nor can it given the fundamental premises on which its ordering is based (see, e.g., here). And there is little to suggest that its fundamental character as a means of social control will change (see, e.g., here). Just as the European Marxists bend social, economic and political rules to produce the model revolutionary worker (e.g. here (Cuba)), so Western democracies seek to move the levers of economic, political, and legal authority, backed by tremendous efforts at setting the social discourse, to produce the model citizen as an economic, social and political actor (e.g., here).

All of this came to mind as I read an alert from my colleague Francine Lipman at UNLV, whose work in the area are must reads. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities is "a nonpartisan research and policy institute. We pursue federal and state policies designed both to reduce poverty and inequality and to restore fiscal responsibility in equitable and effective ways." (CBPP Mission). It has released a user-friendly overview of its state-by-state antipoverty data analysis, including information about broad and deep participation in Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). A program that has been referenced in recent national news.

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Copyright; Citation and Attribution:

All essays are (c) Larry Catá Backer except where otherwise noted. All rights reserved. The essays may be cited and quoted with appropriate reference. Suggested reference as follows: Larry Catá Backer, [Essay Title], Law at the End of the Day, ([Essay Posting Date]) available at [http address].

The author holds a faculty appointment at Pennsylvania State University. Notice is hereby given that irrespective of that appointment, this blog serves as a purely personal enterprise created to serve as an independent site focusing on issues of general concern to the public. The views and opinions expressed here are those of its author. This site is neither affiliated with nor does it in any way state, reflect, or represent the views of Pennsylvania State University or any of its entities, units or affiliates.

Ravitch and Backer's Law and Religion: Cases, Materials, and Readings

3rd Edition 2015

Broekman and Backer, Signs in Law

Springer 2014

BACKERINLAW--PERSONAL WEBSITE

Here you can find my published work, manuscripts, presentations, and more!

Globalization Law and Policy Series from Ashgate Publishing

Globalization: Law and Policy will include an integrated bodyof scholarship that critically addresses key issues and theoretical debates in comparative and transnational law. Volumes in the series will focus on the consequential effects of globalization, including emerging frameworks and processes for the internationalization, legal harmonization, juridification and democratization of law among increasingly connected political, economic, religious, cultural, ethnic and other functionally differentiated governance communities. This series is intended as a resource for scholars, students, policy makers and civil society actors, and will include a balance of theoretical and policy studies in single-authored volumes and collections of original essays.

An interview with the Series EditorQueries and book proposals may be directed to:Larry Catá BackerW. Richard and Mary Eshelman Faculty Scholarand Professor of Law, Professor of International AffairsPennsylvania State University239 Lewis Katz BuildingUniversity Park, PA 16802email: lcb911@gmail.com

About Me

I hope you enjoy these essays. Each treats aspects of the relationship between law, broadly understood, and human organization. My essays are about government and governance, based on the following assumptions: Humans organize themselves in all sorts of ways. We bind ourselves to organization by all sorts of instruments. Law has been deployed to elaborate differences between economic organizations (principally corporations, partnerships and other entities), political organization (the state, supra-national, international, and non-governmental organizations), religious, ethnic and family organization. I am not convinced that these separations, now sometimes blindly embraced, are particularly useful. This skepticism serves as the foundation of the essays here. My thanks to Arianna Backer for research assistance.